Permutation City Blog

I ended up reading a lot of books about cats around Christmas. This one had the odd, and slightly irritating, habit of writing from some fictional cats point of view at the end of each chapter. As a work on cats it was fine but I'd seen most of it before in other books.

Rather than concentrate on big main courses the menu offers you a wide selection of smaller dishes costing about £4 each. Poppadoms to start and couple of these with rice or bread made for a lovely dinner. Go with a group of people and you get to try even more dishes. The butter chicken was wonderfully rich, the chicken saag was lovely and spicy, the lamb was beautifully cooked, lentil dishes were very tasty. I was definitely impressed by this restaurant, my only quibble is that they don't serve naan. (There were at least some vegetarian choices but I wasn't paying enough attention to rate it.)

I ignored the first series and only started watching part way through the second season. It has a lot of action, frequently in the form of Buffy kicking vampires (or demons) in the head. Sometimes this seems repetitive with the latest evil arriving in Sunnydale just to be swiftly dispatched. What's surprising is that most of the time it stays fun. Each of the characters have background and motivation that goes beyond the individual episodes and they change over time. Some seasons are better than others with different bad guys and themes being developed. Season Three is one of my favourites but all have their good points. Off the top of my head some episodes to watch: Once More, with Feeling to show what can be done with words (or song in this case) and Hush to show what can be done without words.

It has similar characters and a similar world to the film but different twists and turns. It is also much more extensive with two additional stories. There is more time to develop details about the magic of their world and the way in which the war is fought. I really enjoyed it and would encourage anyone who liked the film to take a look at this too.

His earlier work was fantastic and but eventually it petered out and I gave up reading. It just seemed like there was only so much you could get out of one series. I've heard good things about more recent works but haven't read any. Make no mistake, there are a lot of good books there and it's hard to choose. Let's just say that Witches Abroad is definitely one to read.

With Kurdish food, or at least Kurdish food that I had, flavours are kept seperate rather than blended together. Barbecued meat, grilled tomatoes, a salad, and delicately flavoured rice were all simple and singular but well balanced. Starters and main courses were served with nice flat bread. I ate both the cucumber and olives in my starter which, for me, is remarkable.

This is set five years after the original when the ghostbusters have been sued and discredited. Although this good fun, with a few excellent lines, it did feel like a box ticking exercise has produced a standard Hollywood sequel.

A good sequel continuing the story started in Shrek. It spends a lot of it's time making fun of other films and the world in general. Although the non-humans look good the people look slightly wooden, a common problem with computer animation.

Although this makes a reasonable children's film it suffers in comparison to the book. Much of the detail has been lost, perhaps to be expected, but for some reason a mystical element has been added, for me that spoiled it.

This had some fairly interesting ideas. A society in which you can say anything you like as long as it's provably true. Human mutants that had been created as a result of a war, one of whom could accurately predict the future. He experiences his life one year before it happens, the present day is already an old memory for him. In a side story mutants are being deliberately created to colonise Venus. Then there are the alien "drifters". However the exploration of these ideas is patchy and I left the book thinking something was missing.